Higgs and Englert collect 2013 Nobel Prize for Physics

Professor Peter Higgs—an honorary fellow of IOP and 1997 winner of the Dirac Medal—and Belgian physicist François Englert have collected the Nobel Prize for Physics at a ceremony in Sweden.

They received the Nobel Medal, Nobel Diploma and a document confirming the Nobel Prize amount from King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden.

Higgs and Englert were awarded the Prize in October for “the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles”, which was recently confirmed through the discovery of the Higgs boson by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.

In response to the announcement in October, Dr Frances Saunders, President of the Institute of Physics (IOP), said: “The work undertaken to discover the Higgs—from the original theories to the construction of the world’s most powerful particle-smasher—has led to a very exciting and productive period in physics research. It has been a long journey but one that has inspired a generation to engage with the subject.”

“With the existence of the Higgs boson confirmed, explaining why the fundamental building blocks of nature acquire mass, we can now move on to the next challenges to our understanding such as the phenomena of dark matter and quantum gravity.”

To coincide with the awarding of the Prize, the journal Physica Scripta, published by IOP Publishing on behalf of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, has published the proceedings from the Nobel Symposium on the “Physics of the Large Hadron Collider” which took place in Sweden earlier this year.

The prestigious annual event brought together a range of speakers to discuss the latest results to come from the Large Hadron Collider program and offer a perspective on the future of particle physics.

The proceedings, which consist of 25 individual papers, include a paper examining the role of big laboratories as key research infrastructures, written by Rolf-Dieter Heuer, Director General of CERN, as well as papers discussing the on-going search for Dark Matter and the important advances in neutrino physics.